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HEALTH CARE OVERHAUL
ECONOMY
Health law deadline drawing near
Work’s available Openings increase to highest level since 2001 By NINA GLINSKI
By RICARDO ALONSO-ZALDIVAR ASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON — Hundreds of thousands of people who signed up under the new health care law risk losing their taxpayersubsidized insurance unless they act quickly to resolve questions about their citizenship or immigration status. The government warned on Tuesday that they have just over three weeks to show that they’re eligible. Of the 8 million people who signed up for private coverage through President Barack Obama’s law, more than 2 million at one point had discrepancies of some sort that could have affected their eligibility. That number has been greatly reduced — but the remaining cases are proving difficult to untangle. Illegal immigrants are not allowed to get the coverage. Officials at the Health and Human Services Department said that letters are being sent to about 310,000 people with citizenship or immigration issues, many of whom haven’t responded to repeated outreach efforts. Many of them may be Hispanic, a group that historically has lagged in health insurance coverage. Indeed, two states with large Latino populations top the list of unresolved cases. Florida has 93,800 cases while Texas has 52,700. Georgia, Virginia and Pennsylvania round out the top five. Some supporters of the law worried that eligible consumers might lose coverage due to record-keeping problems on the government’s part, or because of something as mundane as letters getting lost in the mail. “Many of these people have issues because government files are incomplete,” said Ron Pollack, executive director of the advocacy group Families USA. “Many may feel that they have fully complied with what is necessary to get health coverage.” The number of problem cases was a lot larger only a few months ago, prompting criticism from congressional Republicans that the administration
was signing up people ineligible under the law. In May, there were nearly 970,000 people with citizenship or immigration problems. About half those cases have now been closed, officials said, and another 20 percent are being actively worked on. The letters will notify the remaining enrollees that they still need to upload their documents to HealthCare.gov by Sept. 5, or mail them in. Otherwise, their coverage will end on Sept. 30. The letters are being sent in English and Spanish. The new policy affects the 36 states where the federal government has taken the lead in running online insurance markets created by the law. It’s unclear how it will apply in places like California and New York, which are running their own insurance exchanges. Consumers who have unresolved discrepancies over their incomes will get notices at a later date. The new health law provides subsidized coverage to people with no access to health insurance on the job. More than 80 percent of those signed up are getting subsidies to help with their premiums and, in some cases, their copays and deductibles as well. But those taxpayer subsidies are contingent on meeting a host of requirements. The amount of a consumer’s premium tax credit can vary by income, family size, hometown and other factors. That can make getting covered through the law feel somewhat like doing your taxes. The letters that started going out Tuesday won’t be the final attempt to reach those with unresolved issues. HHS will try to contact each consumer two more times by phone and once via email. The administration is also working with local organizations to try to reach people directly in their homes. Consumers can also contact HealthCare.gov’s call center at 1-800-318-2596 to see what documents they need to submit and see whether their information has been received.
BLOOMBERG NEWS
Job openings rose in June to the highest level in more than 13 years, firming up the U.S. labor market picture for the second half of the year. The number of unfilled positions climbed by 94,000 to 4.67 million, the most since February 2001, from a re-
vised 4.58 million in May, a report from the Labor Department showed Tuesday. Tuesday’s figures are among those on Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen’s employment “dashboard,” which she uses to help guide monetary policy. The increase in openings, combined with the highest readings on the number of people hired and leaving their jobs
since 2008, means the healing in the labor market is broadening, albeit at a measured rate. “There’s improvement, but it’s still slow and uneven,” said Joseph LaVorgna, chief U.S. economist at Deutsche Bank Securities Inc. in New York. Hiring, firings and quits will need to be closer to pre-reces-
See JOBS
PAGE 11A
RECREATION
LOTS NOT TO BE SEEN Museum has much in storage By DAVID FLICK THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS
Photo by Mark Knight/Perot Museum of Nature and Science | AP
The $185 million Perot Museum of Nature and Science offers the public 180,000 square feet spread out over five floors with 11 permanent exhibit halls. However, some specimens in closed-to-the-public storage areas are more than a century old. The oldest — a snow bunting — dates to 1885.
DALLAS — On the five public floors of the Perot Museum of Nature and Science, visitors can view 396 specimens of preserved animals and dinosaur bones. But there are another 117,703 museum artifacts they can’t see, and — with few exceptions — never will. The Dallas Morning News reports while the items include some books and artwork, the vast majority are animals — fossil remains from eons past and preserved specimens of animals that still walk the earth, said Karen Morton, the collections manager. Morton is in charge of cataloging and housing the specimens at three sites in Dallas: the old museum facilities in Fair Park, the basement of the new museum and an unmarked warehouse near the Dallas Design District. There, almost every square foot of the floor, walls and shelves is crowded. If you’re thinking of donating grandpa’s stuffed deer head in the attic, don’t. “We’re full. The rooms
See MUSEUM
PAGE 11A
ABORTION
State law could send women across borders By JUAN CARLOS LLORCA AND PAUL J. WEBER ASSOCIATED PRESS
EL PASO — Crossing borders is a part of life in El Paso in far West Texas, where people may walk into Mexico to visit family or commute to New Mexico for work. But getting an abortion doesn’t require leaving town. That could change if a federal judge upholds new Texas rules that would ban abortions at 18 clinics starting Sept. 1, including only one that offers the proce-
dure in El Paso, where one of the toughest anti-abortion laws in the U.S. has come under particular scrutiny at a trial ending Wednesday in Austin. Without any abortion providers in El Paso, women there would face a 550-mile trip to the nearest place in Texas to legally terminate a pregnancy. Attorneys for the state point out that women wouldn’t really have to drive that far: They could simply go to a clinic 15 minutes away in Santa Teresa, New Mexico. Opponents of the new rules
say that argument shows the goal isn’t to protect women, as supporters contend. New Mexico — which one anti-abortion group mocks as the “anything goes” Wild West of abortion access — does not require the same new standards that Republican Gov. Rick Perry approved in 2013 in the name of protecting women’s health. It also doesn’t require the pre-abortion sonograms that Texas began mandating in 2012. “It’s hypocritical to say they want to protect women, to say that they want women to have a
safe abortion and then take away the clinics and make the women go to another state. How do you care about the women of Texas? They don’t care,” said Gerri Laster, who ran what had been a second abortion clinic in El Paso before it closed in June because of other new mandates. U.S. District Judge Lee Yeakel is not expected to immediately issue a ruling after closing arguments Wednesday, but he’ll be on a tight timeline. The law would leave just seven abortion facilities in Texas, all of
which would be in major cities and none in the western half of the nation’s second-largest state. The seven facilities that will remain already have operating rooms, sterile ventilation systems and other hospital-style standards that abortion providers are required to meet under the new Texas law. Outraged abortion clinic owners say they can’t afford to make those upgrades, which they criticize as unnecessary.
See BORDERS PAGE 11A